Tuesday 12 March, 7pm
£7 – £10
Free Word Centre, 60 Farringdon Road, London, EC1R 3GA

Intan Paramaditha is a fiction writer and academic whose works focus on the intersection between gender and sexuality, culture and politics. Norman Erikson Pasaribu is a poet, fiction and non-fiction writer who was dubbed by English PEN as ‘part of a long tradition of queer Catholic writing’. Both Paramaditha and Pasaribu are deeply engaged with Indonesian feminist and cultural activist networks. They will be joined by writer, performer and activist Harry Josephine Giles to discuss how writing can be an act of resistance against the prevailing culture and to consider how to navigate life as an activist writer. Chaired by Theodora Danek.

This event is presented by English PEN in partnership with the British Council as part of the Indonesia Market Focus at The London Book Fair 2019.

Book tickets

Norman Erikson Pasaribu is a writer of poetry, fiction, and non-fiction. Dubbed by English PEN as ‘part of long tradition of queer Catholic writing’, his first book of poems Sergius Seeks Bacchus won a PEN Translates Award in 2018. Translated into English by Tiffany Tsao, the book will be published in the UK by Tilted Axis in 2019. In 2017, he won the Young Author Award from the Southeast Asia Literary Council. In the same year he was chosen as a writer’s in residence in Vietnam by Indonesian National Book Committee and Ministry of Education and Culture. He published a collection of short stories in 2014 and is currently working on his first novel. He is one of most the most celebrated young writers in Indonesia today.

Harry Josephine Giles is a writer and performer from Orkney and based in Edinburgh. Their poetry collections Tonguit (2015) and The Games (2018) were both shortlisted for the Edwin Morgan Poetry Award, and Tonguit for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. Harry Josephine was the 2009 BBC Scotland slam champion, founded Inky Fingers Spoken Word, and co-directs the performance platform Anatomy. Their poetry has toured North America, Europe and New Zealand, and their participatory theatre has toured widely, including Forest Fringe (UK), NTI (Latvia), CrisisArt (Italy) and Teszt (Romania). Harry Josephine’s performance What We Owe was picked by the Guardian’s best-of-the-Fringe 2013 roundup – in the “But Is It Art?” category. www.harrygiles.org

Intan Paramaditha is an Indonesian fiction writer and academic based in Sydney, whose works focus on the intersection between gender and sexuality, culture and politics. Her short story collection Apple and Knife, translated into English by Stephen J. Epstein, takes subversive feminist horror to new levels, and was published by Brow Books (Australia) and Harvill Secker (UK) in 2018. Gentayangan (The Wandering), her debut novel on travel and displacement where readers choose their own narrative path, was selected as Tempo Best Literary Work for Prose Fiction in 2017. The novel received the PEN Translates Award from English PEN and the PEN/ Heim Translation Fund Grant from PEN America, and it will be also be published by Harvill Secker in 2020. Intan was the winner of the Kompas Best Short Story Award in 2013 and the co-author of horror anthology Kumpulan Budak Setan (The Devil’s Slaves Club, 2010), with Eka Kurniawan and Ugoran Prasad. She has been invited to international festivals and academic forums and is actively involved in several feminist projects focusing on cultural activism in Indonesia. She holds a Ph.D. from New York University and teaches Media and Film Studies at Macquarie University.